13 October 2008
Twenty years to leave Henry and Joe behind
There’s a funny thing. So now both of the granite statues have turned out to be made of cardboard. Say goodbye to Stalins panopticon empire and Henry Ford’s slash and burn capitalism.
I guess this moment is an opportunity. Hopefully we wont be stupid enough to start listening to the boys with the uniforms with all their talk about renewal and virility. I hope even more that we won’t get took in by the boys with beards either because soon they will soon be telling us it’s all our fault for being bad.
As we do seem to be heading for the brown creek I guess that people will stop buying art as well. No change there, most people I know never did anyway. This ‘crisis of markets’ is good because it gets working artists off the hook. Maybe art and marketing will finally fall out of bed with each other and even better the rest of us wont have to watch then flirting anymore. I no longer feel even slightly that I have to make stuff to please other people or the media.
The trouble is I’m experiencing a somewhat traumatic de leveraging restructure myself in the studio. Have been prevaricating. What prevaricating really means for me is trying to do too much rather than too little. Too many parallel ideas and projects that are started and abandoned before they draw breath.
I had a really interesting conversation with my friend Alan about this.
We were thinking about the importance of lines, and linear structure in pictures. We both value the kind of sharpness that comes from a well placed drawn mark that counterbalances the smeared, flowing field made by a brush. Most of what we see is lit by smeared fields of light and dark. Shadows and highlights have no edges, really. Our bodies are thinly contained liquid marks, bags of water that slosh and sag as much as they stride and pose. That means brushes are the best kit for recording it all, however much I find them irritatingly fluffy sometimes. But I value incisive looking and drawing so much in others - Giacometti, Moore (Bobby and Henry) Goya, Whistlers London etchings. In the middle of these fluid fields of tone there has to be bones. That’s what makes Goya’s aquatints such a revelation. There has to be lines. I need those tiny fragile marks to record the fact that I was here and I was looking. Soft and hard, intrusive and receptive. All very I Ching.
That’s enough writing. I’m going back to the playpen.
(1) 13 October 2008 at 12:30 pm
Steve
One of the things I’m relearning, now I’ve started drawing again, is the importance of edges. We are pattern-seeking animals and our visual systems are especially well adapted to discerning edges. Robotics researchers put enormous effort into teaching their computer vision systems to detect the edges of objects (as opposed to a change of colour or tone within an object). An edge means change. It helps define something by its boundaries and by what it isn’t. Having spent years being told NOT to draw by marking outlines, I’m finding out that it’s not always a bad thing.
(2) 13 October 2008 at 12:48 pm
doug
That’s strange - in fact its another funny thing in addition to the collapse of anglo saxon capitalist project. I think edges are dangerous. We see edges exactly as you say because they signify change.
Because we evolved as opportunistic savannah hunter gatherers we know the difference between foliage and small thing I can eat and even more important the difference between foliage and a big thing I run away from. But in drawing, linear looking there is a danger that we see boundaries above relationships. Edges are easier and that is what makes them like the magnetic lasso tool in photoshop, our eyes get stuck on them.
Not sure what I’m talking about here, so I’ll get back to trying to draw a lizard as reference for a new Changeling print.